In this post, I’ll profile a managed DDoS for hire service, offering to “take down your competitor’s web sites offline in a cost-effective manner”.

More details:

Screenshots of the DDoS for hire/Rent a botnet service:

The managed service is currently offering HTTP (GET, POST), Download, ICMP, UDP, and SYN flooding features, using what they’re pitching as private tools operated by expert staff members. Before a potential customer is interested in purchasing a DDoS attack for hire, the service if offering a 15 minute test to the customer in order to prove its effectiveness.

What about the prices?

The price for 1 hour or DDoS attack is $5

The price for 24 hours of DDoS attack is $40

The price for 1 week of persistent DDoS attack is $260

The price for 1 month of persistent DDoS attack is $900

The service is also offering 5%, 7%, 10% and 15% discounts to prospective customers, with a return policy based on the remaining time from the originally purchased package.

The service profiled in this post, is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the overall availability of DDoS for hire managed services within the cybercrime ecosystem. This fierce competition prompts for unique client acquisition tactics, such as offering complete anonymity throughout the purchasing and post-purchasing process in order to ensure that anyone can request any target, including high profile ones, to be attacked.

Moreover, although the service is undermining the OPSEC (operational security) of the proposition by advertising on public forums, the business model of the competition is often driven by invite-only sales, where prospective customers are trusted and verified as hardcore cybercriminals with a significant credibility within the cybercrime ecosystem. These competing services even offer the possibility to a target government or law enforcement web sites, despite the fact that their botnet’s activity will be easily spotted by security vendors and law enforcement agencies.

Instead of exposing their main botnets and potentially risking their exposure, the cybercriminals behind these campaigns have been developing the “aggregate-and-forget” botnet model for years. These botnets that never make the news, are specifically aggregated for every customer’s campaign in order to prevent the security community from properly attributing the source for the attack, taking into consideration the historical malicious activity performed by an already monitored botnet.

Webroot will continue monitoring the development of the DDoS for hire service profiled in this post.